Well, folks, we’ve almost made it. The arrival of Captain America: The Winter Soldier marks
the last film in Marvel’s Avengers series until all our friends are back together again in The Avengers: Age of Ultron, which will come blasting into theaters next summer. (First we’ve got a whole new Marvel franchise, Guardians of the Galaxy, starting
in August.) If the Captain, a.k.a. Steve Rogers, is running the anchor leg of the race to 2015, it’s fitting that his latest adventure begins with him doing laps around the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial. Here’s the squarest of our superheroes (played
by beefy Chris Evans), dutifully keeping himself in shape, in respectably patriotic fashion no less. But he’s also running alone, and from the very beginning of The Winter Soldier it’s clear that Rogers is feeling lost in time, unsure about his place in this modern world.

It’s with that pensive note that The Winter Soldier begins the heavy work of setting us
up for Avengers 2, tasked with upping the ante for the movie event of the millennium while also telling its own story. It’s not an easy feat, but as with nearly all of Marvel’s joyful recent run of movies, The Winter Soldier pulls it off with charming moxie.
The studio’s smartest strategy has been to hire outside-the-box directors for most of these projects, and here Community writers Joe Russo and Anthony Russo imbue The Winter Soldier with a wit and bounce that The First Avenger’s Joe Johnston couldn’t
quite manifest. Captain America hasn’t become some snarky jokester like Tony Stark. But the Russos, and their screenwriters, do a nice job of playing him off of his own context, the same way that others have done for the coulda-been-completely-ridiculous Thor
in his two sturdy but playful films.

Captain America is our government guy, so his second outing mostly takes place in Washington
D.C. (Cleveland acts the part well) and dives into the inner-workings of S.H.I.E.L.D. Having already seen the corruption of absolute power up close, Steve is reluctant to fully throw his hat in the ring for S.H.I.E.L.D., especially after its enigmatic leader
Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, getting more and more to do as the Marvel Universe expands) shows him the three new helicarriers being built to replace the one destroyed in the first Avengers movie. Fury explains that these new flying warships use the latest
technology to pinpoint potential targets down to their DNA, an obviously troubling technology that has Steve questioning his faith in this mostly unregulated wehrmacht. Add some shifty stuff involving S.H.I.E.L.D.’s real head honcho, Robert Redford’s avuncular
Alexander Pierce, and you’ve got the makings of a robust tale of cover-ups, lies, and dark, long-buried secrets.

For a decent enough stretch of The Winter Soldier, there’s a real mystery that manages
to tingle satisfyingly amidst all the necessary clatter. And the film has fun getting lots of folks involved, including Fury, his trusty right-hand woman Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders), and most of all Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow. That she
and Evans have the chemistry they do is owed almost entirely to Johansson, who here more than ever is an endlessly appealing blend of snappy good humor and icy edge guarding carefully held secrets. Oh would that Marvel were brave enough, and Johansson willing,
to give Black Widow her very own movie. She’s given a good amount of stuff to do here, but when things really get going she’s forced by edict to move into second position behind our brave Captain.

Captain America’s first adventure is probably my least-favorite of the Avengers movies, in
large part because Evans lacks the innate charisma needed to liven up this aggressively earnest character. But here, under the light but thoughtful guidance of the Russos, he gives Cap’n Steve frissons of darkness, or maybe just melancholy, that manage to turn him,
quite suddenly, into one of the more interesting characters in the Avengers realm. How would a 95-year-old man in a twentysomething’s body adapt to all this modern chaos while maintaining some semblance of mission and self? The Winter Soldier isn’t overly existential,
but the way it teases at those deeper questions allows Evans to give his performance a welcome bit of shading. I liked Captain America for the first time in this movie, because haunted, reluctant heroes are usually the most compelling kind.

You’ll notice I haven’t yet mentioned the titular soldier. That’s partly because I know how
spoilerphobic Marvel fans are (I wouldn’t have even mentioned the helicarriers, but they’re in the trailer), but also because his presence in the film feels oddly tacked-on, as if the film was afraid of simply launching us into Avengers: Age of Ultron setup
without giving us some new temporary big-bad to contend with. Though the Winter Soldier does factor into Steve Rogers’s overall character arc, I wish Marvel had felt confident enough in this movie’s place as part of something bigger to simply focus on moving forward.
The Avengers movies’ overall greatest achievement, that they all mesh so well within their shared universe, stands in direct contrast to their greatest failing. Which is that the climax of each film is usually such a senseless melee of stuff done in pursuit
of an arbitrary goal. The climax of The Winter Soldier has much more to do with the bigger picture than, say, Iron Man 3’s or Thor: The Dark World’s, but still. Why not just tell us one long continuous story instead of worrying so much about setting
up flimsy new pins to knock over each time out of the gate?

I realize that what I’m really asking for here is a TV series, and obviously we know in this
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. time of ours that that’s not exactly what people are clamoring for. But I’m hooked enough by the larger Marvel narrative now, and I think many other people are too, that I don’t think they need to design each of these pictures as a
standalone entity. They should dispense with the unnecessary MacGuffins and truly focus on the bigger task at hand. Move those tantalizing post-credits sequences into the pre-credits world! Marvel doesn’t need to hedge its bets anymore. This huge thing is
working, so why not go for broke and just tell us one big, long story?

Obviously that doesn’t make all that much economic sense, but
I’m tired of leaving these Marvel movies feeling like I only got a real bite of something right at the very end. The Russos have crafted good, eye-popping scenes of explosive flurry, but it would be more interesting if it had all been leading somewhere with
the same intensity as the intriguing bits of exposition. I like The Winter Soldier, as I’ve liked all the Marvel movies. But I'm eager to get to the real main event, whatever that might be.